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TBH Nuc's

I need some help with making up nuc's for TBH's. I've gotten some additional nuc request's to go into TBH's. Are nuc supplier's providing a different Top Bar with their nuc's or are the standard deep frames being used and added to the TBH's and then being rotated out of the hive as it's established?? Have no clue but would be happy to be brought up to speed!! Thanks for any info.

While some people opt to use top bars the length of standard frames, my understanding is there are no standards for TBH dimensions. When I asked for nucs from from a local beekeeper, who had never seen a TBH before, I supplied my own nuc boxes because my TBH's definitely deviate from Lang dimensions.

Also I don't think you want to have bee space between the top bars since (generally speaking) you don't super a TBH. Every TBH I've seen has had bars that butt up to one another and are typically 1.5" wide (same width as the thickest dimension of a standard frame).

You may want to confer with your customers and make sure you both understand exactly what's expected to be delivered. You might be dealing with someone who's no more familiar with TBH's than you. I had to educate my supplier a bit in order to get exactly what I needed.

Thanks for the reply. Checking with the customer, now there's an idea!! Both of these folks are just getting into bee's so I will getting more info. Just needed some idea's for myself and a better understanding where they may be heading.

One added note from experience...make sure the nuc boxes are plenty big for the number combs/frames you plan to deliver. It gets awfully tricky to remove bars with no leveraging space between them and fresh, unsupported comb dangling from them. A frame feeder or follower board (even if it's not needed) is a good way to provide a 'null' space for opening up a cram-packed nuc.

I built my own. I built them as swarm traps but decided to build them just like my hives because I thought it would be silly to do it any other way. This way I have bars in all my traps, and they will directly transfer to my hives. I can also use these as transfer boxes and I can use them to make splits or nuc's for myself or others. My bars are 19" long so they will fit in a Lang box if somebody wants a nuc for a lang box. All they would need to do is put the top bars in one side, and frames in the other so that the bees can transition over to the frames, then just replace the bars eventually.

This is how I did it:Transfer frames
Except I used regular deep frames where it says medium. Can you do medium frame nucs? That would allow them to do a bit shorter top bars. Using deeps forced me to have a bit over 20" for the top bar measurement and that's wider than I like. (The bees tend to round the ends to support the extra heavy comb.)